The Human Population:
Patterns, Processes, and Problematics
Lecture #12: Ch 7 Migration continued…
Paul Sutton
psutton@du.edu
Department of Geography
University of Denver
Why Do People Migrate?
• Wilbur Zelinsky’s ‘Mobility Transition’ or
Migration Transition as part of the demographic
transition.
• At the 2nd phase of demographic transition
population grows dramatically which strains
resources and causes out-migration (example:
exodus from Europe in 18th century)
• Theory of Demographic Change & Response:
People move to where the resources are.
• Urban Transition: Migration from rural to urban
Ravenstein’s “Laws” of Migration
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
1) Most migrants only go short distance
2) Migration proceeds step by step
3) Migrants going long distance prefer big cities
4) Each migration stream produces a compensating counter stream
5) Rural people more migratory than urban
6) Women more migratory within country; Men more migratory between
countries
7) Most migrants are adults – families rarely migrate out of their country
of birth.
8) Large cities grow more by migration than natural increase
9) Migration increases in volume as industries and commerce develop and
transportation improves
10) The major stream of migration is rural to urban
11) The major cause of migration is economic
The “Push-Pull” theory of Migration
• Some people migrate because they are “pushed” or
driven out of their home location.
• Other people migrate because they are “pulled’ or drawn
to the location they migrate to.
• “Pull” more important than “Push”
• “Bad and oppressive laws, heavy taxation, an unattractive
climate, uncongenial social surrounding, and even compulsion
(slave trade, transportation), all have produced and are still
producing currents of migration, but none of these currents can
compare in volume with that which arises from the desire
inherent in most men to ‘better’ themselves in material
respects.”
Ravenstein
Migration as a Cost-Benefit Analysis
• In Push – Pull context; No matter how bad it is
people are not motivated to move unless they see
a better opportunity someplace else (a Pull)
• “Costs” of moving: Intervening Obstacles
(distance to expected destination, cost of travel,
personal health situation, etc.)
• Economic variables dominate most explanations
of why people migrate.
• #1 Reason U.S. citizens migrate is to travel to a
new job.
Migration Potential
• 1) Migration is selective (not everyone migrates
with equal propensity)
• 2) The heightened propensity to migrate at
certain stages of the life cycle is important in the
selection of migrants.
• Key life-cycle events: Going to College, Taking a
Job, Getting Married.
Migration Selectivity
• Selectivity by Age
• Selectivity by Life-Cycle
• Selectivity by Sex (gender)
Migration
selectivity
by age
Selectivity by Life Cycle
• Not surprisingly we are very likely to move once
we reach maturity (usually around 18)
• Get a job, get married, have kids. Migrate
• Un married people (single, divorced, seperated &
widowed) have much higher migration rates.
• Migration propensity higher for people with
smaller and younger families. Once kids in
school migration propensity drops.
• Fertility is lower just before migration & higher
just after migration.
Selectivity by Sex
• The lower the status of women in a country or region
the greater the differential in migration propensity
between men and women with men’s propensity being
higher.
• Countries where wife joins a husband from “out of
county” may have higher migration rates for women.
• When families move the women usually have reduced
employment prospects relative to where they came
from.
• Globally women are migrating more but have yet to
catch up with men.
Conceptualizing The Migration Process
Note: There is not
comprehensive
‘theory’ of
migration
behavior
Two important Migration
Strategies
• Step Migration: Migrants reduce the risk of
the migration decision by ‘inching’ their way
from home. If it works out badly cost of return
is lower.
• Chain Migration: Migrants follow the path of
‘pioneers’ who have scoped out a particular
place, sent information back, and make it
easier to stay once they get there.
Theories of International Migration
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
The Neo-classical economic approach
The New Household Economics
Dual Labor Market Theory
World Systems Theory
Network Theory
Institutional Theory
Cumulative Causation
The Neo-Classical Economic Approach
• Migration is the ‘free’ market adjustment of labor
supply to difference in the supply and demand for
labor.
• Countries with booming economies and labor
shortages have higher wages. Thus people move
from low wage to high wage areas.
• Migration will continue until the gap in wages is
reduced to the sum of the monetary and
psychosocial costs of migrating.
The New Household Economics
of Migration
• Similar to Neo-classical approach but with a significant
difference. Neo-classical claims individuals make the
decision to migrate whereas New Home Economics sees
the ‘Household’ as a whole as the decision making
entity.
• Households can send individuals based on both risk
minimizing and opportunity maximizing perceptions.
• The reality of ‘remittances’ strongly supports New
Home Economics vs. Neo-Classical theory
Dual Labor Market Theory
• Developed countries have a Primary and a Secondary
sector of the economy. Primary sector characterized by
good wages, benefits, job security etc. Secondary
characterized by low wages, minimal benefits,
instability, and low chances for advancement.
• Historically women, minorities, and teenagers filled
these jobs ‘in country’.
• Lower birth rates reduced supply of teenagers, and
greater social equity produced better opportunities for
women and minorities.
• Result: Immigrants from developing countries sought
for filling these secondary labor positions
World Systems Theory
(the big conspiracy)
• Global economy since the 16th century has developed
into “Core” and “Periphery” nations.
• “Core” nations are the developed world of Europe,
U.S., Japan, etc.
• “Periphery” is just about everyone else.
• Migration is a natural outgrowth of “Core” nations
exploiting “Periphery” nations in the process of
capitalist development.
• As land, labor, and raw material come under influence
and control of global markets migration flows are
inevitable generated.
Network Theory
(more an explanation of sustained migration)
• Migrants establish interpersonal ties that:
“connect migrants, former migrants, and nonmigrants in origin and destination areas through ties
of kinship, friendship, and shared community origin.
They increase the likelihood of international
movement because they lower the costs and risks of
movement and increase the expected net returns to
migration.”
• In many respects this is a generalization of
the ideas of “Chain Migration”
Institutional Theory
• Once migration streams are established that either
donor or reciever or both find beneficial, insititutions
will develop that will sustain migration.
• These organizations may provide a range of services
from humanitarian protection, smuggling people across
borders, providing counterfeit documents, and
arranging for lodging and or credit in the receiving
country.
• These institutions perpetuate migration in the face of
government attempts to limit the flow of migrants.
Anyone remember the Tyson Chicken
underground railroad?
Tyson Foods Indicted for Knowingly
Importing Illegal Workers
On December 19, Tyson Foods was accused in a 36-count indictment of helping smuggle illegal aliens into the U.S.
and employing them at various chicken-processing plants across the Southeast. The indictment capped a 2-½
year undercover investigation by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) into the company. The
indictment says that Tyson managers would contact local smugglers and contract out for shipments of workers.
The managers would get fake documents for the illegal aliens; as part of getting fake Social Security cards they
would submit stolen Social Security numbers to the INS’s Basic Pilot Program for verification of employability
to see which ones were rejected. The managers would also arrange payment via corporate checks given to the
illegal aliens who would turn the money over to the smuggler.
As part of the investigation, undercover federal agents pretending to be smugglers contracted for a load of over 200
illegal aliens, negotiating with Tyson executives in several different states.
The investigation marked a strategy shift for INS interior enforcement, the latest move to refine the agency’s efforts
to stop illegal alien smuggling. The investigation involved wiretaps, paid informers and undercover agents in an
effort to uncover evidence of systematic illegal activity by Tyson. The INS has largely abandoned so-called
“worksite enforcement” operations involving arresting and deporting illegal workers; INS statistics indicate
worksite raids and arrests plummeted over 90 percent from the early 1990s.
Experts estimate that a high percentage of the roughly 400,000 meatpacking workers in the United States are here
illegally. Despite its own estimation that one quarter of those workers are illegal, the INS has engaged in limited
efforts to stop illegal hiring prior to the December indictment. The agency has fined Tyson five times previously
during the 1990s for illegal hiring, and other meatpackers have had to fire some workers under the nowabandoned Operation Vanguard. The chief reason for INS reticence appears political; each prior enforcement
effort would bring attacks from immigrant advocates, unions, and meatpacking industry representatives.
Residents of towns where Tyson has chicken plants say they were not surprised by the indictments. “It was kind of
an open secret that Tyson was helping ship these guys in. How else would they get from the middle of Mexico to
the middle of nowhere?” asked one city employee in Ashland, Alabama. In Noel, Missouri, the city marshal said
he had been reporting illegal aliens involved in crimes to the INS and expected some action.
Cumulative Causation
• Each act of migration influences the potential of
subsequent acts of migration.
• If receiving country ‘welcomes’ immigrants that
increases likelihood of even more immigration.
• If immigrants send money back home
(remittances), that tells people back home that
migrating to U.S. might not be so bad.
• Cumulative Causation is sort of the selfperpetuation theory of migration.
What’s the “Best” explanation?
• None of these theories are entirely refuted
from empirical observations.
• None of these theories really explain
everything associated with migration either.
• Migration is a complex phenomenon with
dramatic social and individual impacts.
Consequences of Migration
• For the individual migrant migrating is usually
pretty stressful.
• Often they deal with xenophobia, racism, etc.
• One coping strategy is seeking an enclave. (a
place within a larger community in which people
of a particular sub-group tend to concentrate)
• Enclaves have plusses & minuses: They can be
access to working capital, protected markets, and
pools of labor; however, they, can enable
retardation of assimilation.
Adaptation, Acculturation,
Assimilation
• Immigrants tend to goe through these three
processes of increasing integration with the
culture of the country they migrate to.
• Acculturation is accelerated if they have
children in school
• Assimilation is often accelerated by
marrying a native of the receiving country.
Different Models for Immigrants
• Assimilation: The Immigrants ‘become’
indistinguishable from natives.
• Integration: Immigrants maintain their own
cultural identity but are accepted as equals.
• Exclusion: Immigrants are segregated in enclaves
or ghettos and are not treated as equals
Children of Immigrants
• Children born in host country have a unique
situation. They have immigrant parents yet were
raised in a foreign place.
• The 1-12 year olds who moved with parents are
often called the 1.5 generation and have a more
mixed cultural upbringing.
• Segmented Assimilation often occurs when
children of immigrants either adopt host country
language & behavior but are limited because they
are still perceived as a minority; or, assimilate
economically but retain ethinic identity.
Societal Consequences
• Host and Donor nations both impacted
demographically, economically by migration.
• Clear age function of migration causes an
increase in the birth rate of host country and a
loss of working population and fertility in donor
country.
• Actual ‘Costs’ very tough to measure. In U.S.
immigration reduces some costs: Groceries,
hotel rooms, restaurant food; but increases
others, Health care, Car Insurance, Education
Forced Migration
• There are at least 50 million people alive today who were
forced to migrate.
• Slavery is the most egregious example of forced migration.
(Still going on in Sudan as late as 1990)
• Biggest Migration from Slavery was the Trans-Atlantic Slave
Trade (11 million Africans from what is now Senegal, Sierra
Leone, Benin, Cameroon, Gabon, Nigeria, and the Congo)
• Most went to Caribbean and Brazil. Although Hundreds of
Thousands went to United States.
• Slave Traders initially Spanish & Portuguese but later
French, Dutch, and English got into it.
• British eventually pushed for abolition of slavery. Outlawed
it in 1833. Canada never allowed slavery and was a haven for
runaway slaves.
• Mexico never big in slavery but explicitly outlawed it in 1827.
Refugees
• There are 14 million
refugees in the world
today.
• Baby without a
country?
When a refugee has a
Child outside their
country
Of origin the child may
have
No citizenship in any
Country whatsoever.
Where do People Migrate?
(Global patterns of migration)
• Historically massive migration to “New Worlds” in 18th,
19th, and early 20th century.
• Immigration curtailed worldwide in early 20th century
due to global depression and WWI and II
• Post WWII unleashed major migrations in Europe and
Asia with boundary realignments and people leaving
war torn areas.
• 1947 partition of India into India and Pakistan prompted
a mass migration of Hindus & Muslims
• 1948 creation of state of Israel created exodus of
Palestinians and influx of Jews from many parts of the
world.
Other Global Patterns of Migration
• South to North Migration: from developing
“South” countries to developed “North”
countries (El Norte)
• From really poor countries to “emerging”
economies in south and southeast Asia.
• From Oil-poor to Oil-rich countries in the Middle
East.
• 4.5 % of population in developed nations is
foreign born whereas only 1.6% of population in
developing world is foreign born. (U.S. ~ 10%)
Global Migration
Sending & Receiving Countries
Migration in the United States
“They came thinking the streets were paved with gold, but found that the
streets weren’t paved at all and that they were expected to do the paving.”
Numbers for last graph for sense of scale
Demographic Profile of the
Foreign Born in the U.S. in 1990
Migration OUT of the United States
• Emigration from the U.S. is not insignificant.
• For every 5 immigrants there is 1 emigrant.
• Most emigrants are foreign born who stayed in
the U.S. for a short or long time and returned
home.
• The Social Security Administration sends about 5
million social security checks outside the U.S.
every month.
Internal Migration in the U.S.
Measuring Aggregate Migration
in the United States
California’s economy took a hard hit in the mid 1990’s. What impact
may that have had on this graphic if it was made at a finer
temporal resolution?
Capturing the Complexity of Contemporary
Population Movement in the U.S.:
Frey’s five trends
• 1) Uneven Urban Renewal
(see “The Rise of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida)
• 2) Regional Racial Division (California, Texas, and New
York get disproportionate share of immigrants and this makes them unique
and distinct)
• 3) The “Hourglass” economy: Regional divisions by
skill level / education with widened income gap
• 4) Baby Boom & Elderly geographic realignments
• 5) Suburban Dominance and City isolation
Migration into Canada (Canadia eh? )
• Pattern somewhat similar
to U.S.
• 1 in 10 Canadians speak
language other than
French or English in the
home.
• 1 in 6 have mother
toungue other than
French or English
• Immigrants are
increasingly coming from
Asia with a strong
Chinese contingent
Next Up: Chapter 8
• The Age & Sex Structure of a Population
• More than you ever wanted to know about
population pyramids……